You haven’t seen or heard them because they are abstracted away by APIs, circuit breakers and proxies. Almost ALL banks, credit card companies, travel systems and other high throughput transaction systems run on mainframe that is written in COBOL.
I think the issue here is that people working in fintech don't seem to come across these systems much, if at all - if you know one specifically, please tell us.
It's still there at the accounting/backend level. Automated Financial Systems Level 3 and it's replacement Vision are commercial loan systems.
LVL3 is pure cobol. It has been recently deprecated but there are many banks who own the code and are still self hosting it, along with it's IBM green screen support.
Vision is a java front end in front of an updated cobol backend. When your reputation is based on your reliability and long term code stability, at what point do you risk making the conversion, versus training new developers to work on your system.
No, we are not afraid of our own systems. The idea that there is some fabled computer system which everyone is too scared to touch doesn’t exist (I work in payment processing). There are levels of controls way outside these systems which provide these safety nets (e.g settlement / reconciliation controls).
If the cobol is still there, it’s not due to risk. If anything, the cobol is a much higher operational risk than replacing it.
Analogously, GDSes like SABRE still ran on mainframes until very recently (c. 2023) [0]. SABRE was written in some combination of assembly and some kind of in-house dialect of PL/I, if I recall.
I worked briefly at a company that wrote applications that interacted with bank mainframes. Think end point bank teller systems and in branch customer/account management. They definitely do exist - every major bank has a mainframe written in (usually) cobol.
But it's very abstracted, part of our main product offering WAS abstracting it. On top of our ready to use applications, we offered APIs for higher-level data retrieval and manipulation. Under the hood, that orchestrates mainframe calls.
But even then that there could be more level of abstractions. Not every bank used screen-level mainframe access. Some used off the shelf mainframe abstractors like JxChange (yes, there's a market for this).
Fintech would be even more abstracted, I imagine. At that point you can only interact with the mainframe a few levels up, but it's still there. Out of sight.
Yet there is no let up in diluting software engineering labor pool with thousands of H1Bs amidst the already distressed labor market from American job seeker perspective.
If H1Bs were so destructive to the software industry, why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?
Also, the idea that eliminating H1Bs will bring more jobs makes absolutely no sense.
If a company is asked to eliminate all their H1B positions, what do you think is more likely:
- they hire a completely new employee in the U.S. at a similar, or if the critics are right and H1B is suppressing salaries, higher salary, or
- they hire the exact same person but now with that person back in their home country and pay them a tiny fraction of what they were paying them in the U.S.?
There may be a handful of jobs where the employee needs to be in the U.S. where sure, a few more Americans will get jobs. But the overwhelming jobs will simply move abroad with the H1 employee, and along with that a whole bunch of dollars that were being spent within the U.S. and was paying US taxes will move abroad and be spent abroad and pay taxes abroad.
“why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?”
Maybe because that’s just not true? Salaries have generally been stagnant over the last 20 years in real terms for most in the industry.
Most developers do not work at FAANG positions, and even those positions are only found in the extremely high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley.
Companies are always free to hire people from wherever they want. However, it could be foreseeable that “American” companies that are largely overseas, maybe at a disadvantage when it comes to taxes or other benefits conferred by the US government. Such companies may find that their products are subject to tariffs when trying to sell those products back in the United States or other active measures to prevent offshore positions. There is a risk as section 147 changes already has shown.
I believe the American public’s appetite to disincentivize and tax the American companies that ship jobs overseas while simultaneously benefiting from the protection, infrastructure and US government contracts directly or indirectly will only increase in the coming years.
Easy to tax physical goods, hard to tax "underpaid" service work.
Is DeepMind an American company? It's owned by Google, but it was founded in, and is still HQed in, the UK, but has offices worldwide. How much appetite do you recon Canada, France, Germany, and the UK have for America's trillion-dollar-club at this point?
Now sure, you could demand any corporations selling in the US, even if not based there, hand over payroll etc. documents and then tax them at whatever the multiplier is to go from that country's salary to US salaries… if you don't mind that means some countries are banned by existing privacy laws from doing business with you, or that even this is easily gamed, or that American exceptionalism is increasingly overstaying its welcome.
Sounds like maybe you’re from Europe? And have a frustration with foreign companies in the US. This further demonstrates that globalism as we’ve seen it with “free” trade is largely coming to a new era with strong headwinds, and it’s not just the US citizenry that wants that. The people that are pro H1B in the US, even given that more than half of the positions hired are foreign-born, are ignoring a stark reality that this will not likely continue. It’s gonna be a rocky road.
That description is painting me with primary colours, but yes, I'm from Europe. Chose to stay in the EU, post-Brexit, rather than stay in the UK or to move to the US.
I think that the internet is incompatible with late 20th century models of national sovereignty. Globalisation itself isn't the problem, it's that services performed across an international border have a very messy relationship with legal obligations, everything from surveillance obligations[0] to minimum wage laws. This will get worse when robots can be tele-operated from a different nation, blurring the division between service and non-service (primary, raw materials; secondary, manufacturing) labour.
I don't think we here in Europe would mind so much, if Big Tech obeyed local laws (even when I disapprove of the law[0], I know I can't pick and choose which laws I follow, every jurisdiction's laws are a package deal). But Big Tech seems to treat European fines for non-compliance as if they were taxes, even though a tax on an import is called a tariff and the US is fine with those.
Interesting points. Totally agree with you on big tech companies simply treating fines as cost of business instead of operating in good faith within the confines of the legal requirements in the countries where they do business.
The EU is fine with tariffs as well though. It’s not a US only activity. However, the US has a history of tariffs as income tax wasn’t even in existence until early 20th century. I’m interested to see what impacts tariffs are going to play as it does seem a reasonable tool for sovereign nations to utilize. Otherwise, how else do they prevent the hollowing out of their working class in countries that do not provide the cheapest labor? Libertarian types will simply say pick up your bootstraps and compete, but that’s not realistic against labor that is a fraction of their cost. Protectionist measures may be the only logical response for the working class to be protected.
> The EU is fine with tariffs as well though. It’s not a US only activity.
Indeed, I don't wish to imply otherwise, I'm just saying it's a bit hypocritical to complain about something being taxed when also implementing a tax of the kind being complained about — even if the thing being complained about is actually a fine rather than a tax, complaining about it as if it were a tax makes it hypocritical. (Also, it's not like the US doesn't fine businesses for not following laws).
I, too, have no idea how this will play out. Even just from what you say, and ignoring the potential bull-in-the-China-shop that would be the economic impact of AI performing useful cognitive labour at below-subsistence-farming wages.
“There are no losers on a winning team, and no winners on a losing team.”
Doesn’t this go against Stack Ranking very team twice a year and pushing out the “subjective” lowest performer ? Why should anyone on the team work for the team when the stack ranking disincentivizes team cohesion.
Indeed. My experience in a large company is that you get a promotion faster by joining a low skills, low performing team than joining a very successful team.
